This Is What It's Like To Spend A Day In The Life Of Bloomberg's Tom Keene

Every day seven or more members of the Bloomberg Surveillance team sit around a table in a bright Bloomberg conference room with Tom Keene at the head. It's about an hour before the show starts at noon.

"What do we call the New Years special," one asked yesterday. Ideas were thrown around the table — 'Surveillance 2012,' 'Surveillance New Year'?

"What do you think," asked Keene, addressing one of the staffers on his right.

Another chorus, this time with laughter — "You should wear those New Years glasses with the 2012," "Or at least a party hat," "Do you want champagne glasses on set?"

Tom furrowed his brow, "No, no, no," I'm not wearing any of that," he responded. Finally an agreement was reached, and Keene went back to addressing the whole table: "Anything else? Let's have fun."

Since 2002 Tom Keene has been a fixture at Bloomberg News. He does Bloomberg Surveillance on the radio (with Ken Prewitt), he writes columns, and every day at noon he takes Surveillance to TV to discuss topics that are really moving markets.

Now he's known all over global Wall Street for his sharp insight, and of course, his bow tie collection (they're Hermes, by the way, and he has too many to count).

"The team invented the process." Keene told Business Insider. "We know what we do, and it's all about the guests... I am the luckiest guy on Wall Street... There's never been a day where I felt like I had a job."

But it is a job, one that the entire industry notices. Keene works incredibly hard like everyone else on Wall Street — 70 to 75 hours a week starting at 4:00 a.m. daily in order to stay ahead of the news cycle. He says his work has become all consuming. He's either reading or working at all times: "The first thing I want to know in the morning," he said, "is where's the euro/dollar."

That could, however, change in a week.

News cycle aside, though, questions involving "where, who, what, and why" are all part of the most important (and obvious) trait about Keene — his insatiable curiosity. He says it comes from his upbringing in Rochester, New York. His family emphasized an understanding of the liberal arts, especially history, and math.

That understanding informs the philosophy he brings to Surveillance and everything else he does for Bloomberg: It's a pyramid, he told Business Insider. Economics is the base, and finance and investment are the sides. It's an idea Keene swears by, and here's another:

"This is Gospel..." he said firmly, "the audience is smarter than we think." On and off Wall Street, from students to executives, he knows his is a public that is hungry for news. It's a sign of the times.

"This is a crises that is getting old," Keene said.

It's usually on Fridays when he received the worst correspondence from his audience. That is the day he hears from Americans who are really struggling. To fix our country, he told Business Insider, we must fix the housing crises first, it is tied to the finances of every person in this nation.

That's one theme driving markets, and another is Europe, a story with constant action. There, according to Keene's expert opinion, progress is stalled because long term and short term solutions do not always come together. It's more complex, though, than anyone thinks, and requires critical qualitative thinking with quantitative rigor.

"It is an outrage the amount of macro babble going on without micro-foundations," Keene said. This only makes things harder for people looking for answers.

These crises are awful the entire world, that's obvious, but they are also what keeps viewers, listeners, and readers craving the analyses on Surveillance. Keene says he never imagined he would be handed an economic meltdown of this magnitude (on either side of the pond), and he and his shows are lucky for it. Every day he has the opportunity to get to the "distinction of the debate." This week, he's wondering if European leaders will find enough cash to prevent disaster.

He is never exaggerating about the importance of the questions he asks. There's a sense of quiet urgency in Keene and it extends to his team — a team he says he can't live without. From his Bloomberg executives to his assistant, from the quantitative analysts he specifically pointed out in the office, to the European team ("it is unthinkable that I could do this without the European economic team"), Keene is constantly mentioning the people at Bloomberg that make his show possible. It's how he started his conversation with Business Insider and how he ended it.

"We have a lot of fun," Keene explained. "It's great because we just need to focus on the moment...we have no clue about tomorrow because the load is so large."